Euro security uberboss Franco Frattini, seeking to justify planned EU border-control measures including a stringent biometrics regime, has made a series of interesting (that is, entertaining/weird/worrying) statements.
Speaking to a ministerial conference in Slovenia this week, Frattini said that certain people including …

COMMENTS

Fingerprints 42 Prove Nationality/Ownership?

A citizen who supplied fingerprints and full DNA profile to the database would also have the full DNA profile of the database with them imagining it to be mirrored in their own. It can then be cracked Open with New Memory Leading ...... The UNXXXXPected Offer with AIRSVP.

Fingerprint Tracking

Hey, that's actually a pretty good idea- people can still live off-grid if they want, it's not particularly intrusive, and it doesn't mean carrying a cad that I'd no doubt forget all the time. And no RFID so it stops the RFID whiners moaning about "oh, if they covered Britain with a cloud of base stations 5ft apart then they'd be able to track me".

Or roll out 'Print and PIN for all cash transactions, handled by a central government SuperServer.

That is, of course, assuming that it can be kept secure and fair. Still there is a safeguard of sorts- If people seem to jump from a bus on one side of a city to the other, commit a horrible bloody murder, then go jump back to their starting point and THEN get off the bus and go to Tesco for a pint of semi-skimmed that'd probably provide the "Reasonable Doubt" required to get them let off in the absence of other evidence.

The Police Scanners could also not report any personally identifying data to the police unless there's _something_ to report- they don't need to know your name, political affiliation or when you last bought milk. It should just flash up outstanding warrants, fines they have to pay, or whatever.

Unfortunately, we have a ridiculously incompetent government so this'll never happen. You'll scan your finger on the Police's scanning doohicky and then have to walk with them till they get a data connection, or the network\server will be congested because of too many scans (Because of a Brazillian Electricians convention perhaps) and it'll take an hour for any useful data to get back to the police. And/Or they'll spend that hour wading through pages of useless information and shopping records before getting to the important stuff.

Done properly, this could be A Good Thing. But it'll not be done properly.

Return the immigrants to where they were first fingerprinted?

If EURODAC shows that the fingerprints have already been recorded, the asylum seeker can be sent back to the country where his/her fingerprints were originally taken...

Soooooo..... If you (as a EU Country) find an illegal immigrant, fingerprint them and deport them, then the next time they try to reenter Europe and get fingerprinted, they get sent back to you.

Here in the Peoples Democratic Judean Republic Land of Dave, we'd just round them up and deport them, without letting the rest of Europe know about the fingerprints ("We posted the CD with the fingerprint data to you guys. Definitely did. Damn, it must have been stolen! My Bad, I shall instigate an urgent review immediately."). This way, as Supreme Leader Dave of the PDJRLD, we'd shuffle the burden of looking after them to our friends in Europe, one of whom would be the first to fingerprint the illegals, and get to keep them everytime they try again.

Paris, because this is a loophole that even she could (drunk) drive a car through.

Not to talk about false positives, bad database management etc...

Even if you assume unfeasibly low false positive rates when you are checking against a database of half a billion entries you will get plenty of false positives (and false negatives for that matter).

It also assumes that they have nice, clean, correctly taken prints for every EU citizen, that there are not a significant number of people whose fingerprints have been damaged or made unreadable by injuries etc.

Whenever I see those kind of projects I always think that while it would be nice if the world was nice, clean and simple then these things might work but then we would most likely not need them.

Objection

I must object strongly at the content of this article. If any politician reads this then they are going to be given way too many ideas and will probably immediately jump on the band wagon and promote it. The politicians won't have the attention plan to get to the end with the negatives, nor will they understand the sarcasm. You may therefore have hastend this on!!!

Mythbusters

All you need is ballistics gel and acid etched copper copy of someone else's fingerprints and then you're someone else. See Mythbusters Crime special for details. Then if the systems are seen as foolproof, you are who your fingerprints say you are. How many cops are going to check if you're wearing fake prints. If there's automated readers you'll be able to go about your unlawful business with impunity while the poor sap whose prints you've copied will be given a free Cuban Holiday with orange coat supplied.

Re: Fingerprints, what happens when they are mis-identified?

Sodder cela pour une alouette!

So now we will be able to be stopped and printed in the street. And of course *just* the exact proportion of white males will be stopped as the population contains. And the stop and print will not be applied with discriminatory intent to racial minorities.

Dangerous idea

Chertof : "Dear Poland, we demand access to this information, in exchange for access to the visa waiver program."

Poland : "No"

Chertof : "Dear Poland, we demand access to this information, or our agreed missile program will be cancelled"

Poland : "Oh, alright, I guess it won't hurt"

Chertof : "And we'd like Hollands data too, especially Minister Rhakof who told us to f*** off, and his wife and kids and ...."

The big problem in creating a pool of information without strong protections on who can use it and when and the ability to enforce those restrictions is, any country that wants to grab that data only needs to find 1 weak link in Europe to do it.

If they can get it from 1 source it's difficult.

If they can get it from 10 sources, they only need to find 1 weak point.

If they can get it from 100,000 sources, it's as good as lost, it's would be so easy to find 1 weak link in 100,000 links.

The real joy of this....

...is that it's being proposed by an Italian. If there is one thing reassuringly stereotypical about Italy it's that population's ingrained love of disregarding any legislation which gets in the way of la dolce vitae. I can't wait to see them try to work this proposal in the streets of Naples.

BTW. That's odd, this proposal's been around a few hours now, and still no enthusiastic gushing from the Home Office. You'd have thought the Blunkett Memorial Soviet would have announced a five year plan to ensure Britain was fully Orwell compliant by the time of the 2012 Olympics.

Evidence for reliability?

"The database does not contain details such as the name of a person because it relies only on biometric comparison, the safest and most accurate available identification method..."

Does anybody know of a single piece of peer-reviewed research on the safety and reliability of fingerprinting as an identification method that is not critically flawed? The only research I know of contains numerous methodology flaws, including a prescreening step that was justified by appealing to the "fact" that there could be no false positives or distinct multiple scans of the same prints...

If policy makers equate "identity" with "matching a fingerprint", there can be no appeal against wrongful (mis)identification by way of fingerprinting. I fear there will be all kinds of miscarriages of justice if biometric identification becomes the norm. Of course bringing in these procedures under the smoke-screen of anti-immigration policy (and anti-terrorism), and applying them to individuals with limited access to justice and little popular support will help ensure that opposition is somewhat muted ... until it is all too late.

Freedom???

Why not make it so that people who speak out about the gov't are exiled to an island north of Scotland. People who read certian types of books are put in mental institutions. Different religions are sectioned to different parts of the cournty.

No Hiding Place ...... so what is to Hide?

Should MPs DNA be fully recorded for the Database just to ensure that no wrong uns slip through into the Privilege of the Mother of Parliaments. Dodgy characters in the Westminster Village........ well, it would be scandalous and sanctimonious to contemplate it.

IT wonderfully focusses attention knowing you easily recorded and identified.

End game?

The objective here is to keep people out. Assume for one wild minute that this works, albeit at hugh expense and with total loss of every last bit of personal freedom.

Then what?

All those people who had the "get up and go" to emigrate will stay put, help fix their own economies, now hugely competitive since the brain drains are plugged and they are unburdened by trillions spent on big brother infrastructure. This results in total collapse of Western civilisation built upon the inequities.

So - unemployed, cold and huddling, we'll try to rush off somewhere nice and sunny, where there is freedom and gainful employment, only to be stopped at their borders with a giant Nelson-esqe "HA-HA!".

fingerprints at the scene of a crime

Wait wait. Here's the bad news. If someone is beaten up at the same bus stop where I happened to get on this morning, my file gets flagged. Now every time I go through a burder, into a secure area, etc., I get interrogated or worse yet denied access with no explanation and no clear path to get it fixed. I was once suspected in a crime because I was standing within the arbitrary perimiter of the crime scene at some prior time.

We've gone from mistrusting people convicted of crimes, to mistrusting people suspected of crimes. This is the fundamental, unforgiveable affront to our civil liberties. Every citizen *might* have committed a crime.

IT's TOOO late

Will the fear of getting my fingerprints scanned one day in a stop-and-search and being deported again prevent me, when I'm not afraid of drowning in the rickety boat?

(See ABOVE 'Ferry', see also under police state)

When my alternative to living in fear of a fingerprint scan is living in fear of war, or ethnic cleansing, or torture, or just plain old starvation and poverty?

(Welcome to the UK, at least the white, working class/unemployed ethnic minority bit)

OK....Lets just go through that one

1. war, yup, UK is at war, which will also bancrupt us as it did the US.

2. ethnic cleansing, tick, white middle classes are being driven out of UK by jonny foreigner.cant walk down road without posibility of being mugged by unemployed (drug dealing)other nation benifite scrounging Chav's

3. Torture, tick, british TV is the worst in the world for reality tv shite and soaps and excells at tallentless tv.

4. Starvation. tick, with food and other prices rising, people are faced with option of heating or food, usually prefering to keep thier drafty hovels warm by running thier wii's and xboxes 24/7.

5. Poverty. TICK, yup, with all these Jonny's sneaking in and stealin our pitiful waged jobs, all those dole scrounging chav's are forced to survive on tins of beans whilst playing with thier wii's and xboxes to while the hours away.

mines the one with the sowester attached with the map of the costa-del-sol in the pocket...

Fratini is a control freak

It is him that wants internet censorship to block anything that could be bolloxed into a bomb to be filtered rather than taking the site and investigating the owners.

Frattini is the sort of dr0k that want's to give SS like powers to EU police forces for public repression rather than obliging/assisting those forces on the QT to run discrete ops against slave drivers/human imports/international terrorism.

Once again a politician has lost the script and decides to abuse and intrude upon the general public in the interests of security (and cost a few billion across the EU) but does precisley nothing against thoses who should really be targetted.

Come on Frattini, wake up and do somthing useful like winding up Al Quaida rather than forcing national police forces to fingerprint non-whites or anyone with a strange accent FFS.

99.9999% of them are OK. Focus on those responsible for the remainig 0.0001% rather than unleashing the Gestapo 2.0 on everyone...

Imperial perogative

We Europeans spent a great deal of effort invading vast swathes of the world back in the 2nd Millenium. Many thousands of British, French, Spanish, Portugese, German, Belgian etc lives were lost (many of whom didn't die from either STDs or fighting other Europeans) in the process of bringing European civilization to the world and how do they repay us? They expect some kind of access to the wealth that we stole from them! Its as though the fact that our societies were built upon a combination of slavery and mass continental-scale pillage somehow justifies them in trying to get a job in our countries.

If only those Africans knew their place! It's not like they don't get enough from us already - after all, where would all those dodgy African regimes be without our help in turning their natural resources into nine figure balances in personal Swiss bank accounts? It's not like we actually want their oil, diamonds or rare metals! And where would they be without British and French made military equipment to protect 'democratic' leaders from those dangerous libertarian minded citizens who seem to think that elections should be free and fair? And we do have a concience - remember how we stopped selling landmines to dictators as soon as our governments realised that voters don't like them? We'll even help patch up the kids blown up by any of those British made mines still out there!